Didn't Imagination acquired Caustic a while ago ? They may have integrated some of the Caustic solution in their GPUs (so it my be something not so new but it is hard to understand from the currently disclosed information).

davepermen wrote:are the gigaflops for the raytracing or just the shaders?

I assume it is peak performance in "useless" stuff like matrix multiplication (so it is like to be just the number of MADD instructions for second for 2). Another pretty obvious limitation is memory bandwidth (i.e. the memory bandwidth of high-end GPUs is insane compare to mobile GPUs, APU, etc.).

it seems like it's for the shaders mostly. as the raytracing unit is fixed function => flops don't really apply there that much.

essentially, the raytracer is a huge looper unit that re-feeds stuff into the shader unit again. but intersections seem fixed function, and you can feed it a scene that it stores locally to trace more rays.

seems very useful to "just do some raytracing" inside a shader where needed. a.k.a. a fully rastericed game could have a raytraced caustic effect on a table, or similar.

and as it's a mobile chip, can i get dozens of them inside one pc, please? 100ts even